It is easy to focus conservation conversations on rangers, reserves, and animal populations. Those are the visible parts of the work. But political decisions matter just as much. Governments decide whether wildlife laws are strong or weak. Courts determine whether penalties are meaningful. Law enforcement agencies decide whether cases are investigated and prosecuted. Public officials determine whether corruption is tolerated or challenged. Without that institutional support,

Wildlife conservation is often presented as a simple conflict between animals and the people threatening them. In reality, the picture is far more complicated. In countries like Malawi, many rural communities live close to protected areas and depend directly on the land for food and income. That means conservation cannot succeed by focusing only on animals. It also has to address the practical realities of the people living beside them. An elephant may be majestic to a touris

Wildlife conservation stories are often dominated by loss. We hear about shrinking habitats, declining populations, poaching, trafficking, and species edging closer to extinction. Those stories matter, but they can also create the impression that wildlife decline is inevitable. Malawi offers a different kind of story. This small, landlocked country in southeastern Africa has spent decades rebuilding wildlife populations that were once devastated by poaching, political instabi

Elephants don’t recognize national borders, but the laws protecting them often stop at the edge of a map. Kenya’s super tuskers reveal why wildlife conservation must follow the animal across borders.

Most writers will tell you they conduct this much research, arms stretched wide, to use this much information, fingers held an inch apart, in the finished book. By the time I completed Blood on the Veld, I had accumulated hundreds of pages about wildlife trafficking, poaching, conservation policy, human-animal conflict, and the economics behind it all. Most of it never appeared in the novel. But many of the stories were too interesting to leave buried in a research file. So I